Building cadence with Objectives and Key Results (OKR) — Part 2 (final)
This article is the final piece of the 2-part series about building cadence with OKR in Gift Card Indonesia (GCI). The first part is available here. In this time, we’d cover the benefits experienced from our OKR adaptation. Also, the simple steps we follow to make our OKR initiative work.
Benefits
Before we dwell into the supporting process that have made our OKR initiative thrive, I’m happy to say that we — as a team — have enjoyed these 3 benefits:
Benefit #1
Saves us a lot of time. Have you ever been in a meeting where 10+ people would take turn to share their updates? If there’re 15 people (as in my team) and each would take 2 minutes to finish, that would add up to 30 minutes. But, that 30 minutes is not the actual time spent. The time spent is the time blocked off multiplied by the number of people in the meeting. Thus, in our case, we has saved 450 minutes of collective work time — per week.
Benefit #2
Promotes higher transparency. Everybody has access to know what others are doing and their priorities — including the managers. And, whether their managers had enough productive days in the previous week.
Benefit #3
Encourages accountability. This is a natural by-product from the previous point. Our team is encouraged to review (and question) whether I had done my priorities as promised. More often than not, reviews happen in a downward fashion (i.e. a supervisor reviews her direct reports). But, with our approach, reviews happen both ways.
Our process: How we do it
First of all, our team member is required to understand the concept of OKR. This article by Christina Wodtke* serves as a great intro. In fact, it’s the post that made me interested in experimenting with OKR to begin with.
*I highly recommend readers to learn from her extensive work on OKR. Very insightful.
Our process is described in the following steps. Our Product and Engineering team do these 4 steps every Monday:
Step 1
I email my OKR before 9am. My other leaders (i.e. Head of Product and Head of Engineering) are required to do the same. Our weekly status emails serve as the reference for others to complete step #2. Thus, it is imperative for us, the leaders, to send ours promptly.
Step 2
Each member is expected to send theirs before noon. This way, they would have time to peruse their leaders’ OKRs and adjust their priorities accordingly.
Since we love Basecamp, we automatically forward those OKRs / emails onto Basecamp. Thus, we keep the related discussion on Basecamp, instead of spamming everyone with emails.
Step 3
At 3pm, I’d work with the Head of Product and Head of Engineering to review each OKR submission. The 3 of us spend 30 minutes to review each entry and make sure all priorities are aligned. This step is the one that we must be really discipline about.
We primarily focus on the priority alignment of our direct reports. In the diagram above, the Head of Product and Head of Engineering are responsible for the pink positions (squares). And, I’d carefully review the blue squares. Thus, hopefully it’d become clearer now that the leaders’ OKR must be ready first and accessible before we expect others’.
In this half-hour meeting, we often communicate directly (phone call or in-person) if things need to be resolved urgently. For the non urgent matters, we’d share our thoughts as comments on Basecamp. We intentionally treat things that are urgent as urgent; otherwise, we’d let the team solve / communicate them asynchronously.
Step 4
After we’re done with step #3, we’d explicitly note the entries that have been reviewed. Although this step might seem trivial, it is important to communicate to your team members that their submission has been properly reviewed.
One of our co-workers mentioned that a similar (OKR) initiative was in place in her previous company. However, it did not last long. He specifically said that people lost their trust in the process when they don’t feel their submission is properly acknowledged. Soon enough, they would ask, “Why would I bother to send my OKR, while no one is looking at it anyway?” In other words, step 3 and 4 are really crucial to be done consistently.
Summary
This post wraps up our short series about how OKR has helped Gift Card Indonesia to build cadence, particularly between the Product and Engineering teams.
I hope that there would be one or two take-away points that you might find useful to be implemented in your organization. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Thank you for reading. And, have a wonderful day.
